2+2 forum update: Site may be down for another week

The 2+2 poker forum was hit by an unprecedented cyber-attack last week (unprecedented in terms of poker anyway), and after over a week of being down there still seems to be no end in sight for the 2+2 poker forums, which released a third update on the situation on May 1st.

According to the update, the 2+2 website will be brought partially back online, but the forums will remain down; likely for at least another week. The poker community is still speculating at the reasons for the extended outage, with reasons from the likely (the site is working on enhancing security) to the unlikely (2+2 owner Mason Malmuth negotiating over an extortion payoff).

Here is a look at the three updates 2+2 has posted on the matter up to this point:

Two Plus Two Forum Outage

On April 26th at approximately 11:20 AM pacific time, the Two Plus Two Forums were closed as a result of a hacker who has displayed the ability to access e-mail addresses and encrypted passwords. He also indicated the ability to decrypt passwords.

While it is unclear the extent of data to which he gained access, e-mail addresses and passwords on the Two Plus Two forums should be considered compromised. If you have used your 2+2 password on any other site, you are advised to change it.

For your security, we are closing the forums until the breach is patched. Upon reopening the forums you will be forced to change your password – it is counterproductive to do so now.

We hope to be back up as soon as possible.

Update for April 27th

Given that this happened in spite of having applied all current security patches from the companies that provide our forum software, we are in the process of employing additional security experts to ensure that we are in compliance with the highest security measures possible.

At this point in time we anticipate forum downtime to be within 4-6 days.

During the forum outage, both the 2+2 Magazine and the 2+2 PokerCast will be available. This includes the release of the next PokerCast episode and the May issue of the magazine. You can also read the 2+2 archives going all the way back to 1997.

Update May 1st

After closer inspection, it’s now clear to us that the 2 + 2 Forums are more likely to come back to life next week rather than this week even though at this point in time we cannot give a definite date, and all efforts are being made to shorten the amount of downtime as much as possible. Mason will be on the next episode of the PokerCast (being recorded tonight) discussing this, and our May 2+2 Internet Magazine should be up before the weekend.

If you were not trying to access the forums, the page you are looking for cannot be found.